ANTHR 4468 - [Jewish Ethnography: Jewish Communities Yesterday and Today]

(crosslisted) JWST 4468, NES 4468

Fall. Next Offered: 2019-2020. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Co-meets with ANTHR 7468/JWST 7468/NES 7468.

J. Boyarin.

The anthropology of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism is a wonderful laboratory for studying vital issues in the study of culture and society: textuality and orality; gender, reproduction and the cycle of generations; tradition, modernity and postmodernity; diaspora and the state; genetics and the politics of identity; forms of difference in the metropole and in colonialism. Until recent decades, there were almost no serious ethnographies of Jewish communities. Today there is a rich new literature in this field. We will read widely to become familiar with this new literature, exploring the politics of ethnography; memoir as an ethnographic source; reflexive and auto-Jewish ethnographies; traditionalist and modernist communities; and communities spread widely through Europe, North America, North Africa and the Middle East.

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